By dkl9, written 2024-205, revised 2024-205 (0 revisions)
'Twas the morning of uni orientation. In a lecture on the uni's courses, we were to pull out devices and follow along on the website. But this was, so far as I recall, the first time I had used my lovely old Alpine Linux laptop (my only computer) outside my home. So, instead of looking at uni webpages, I was struggling the whole time with Wi-Fi configuration.
Technical difficulties: 1. dkl9: 0.
Some others in the audience used their phones' browsers — an excellent alternative, except that my phone is too primitive for that.
Some hours later, in downtime, I tried my hand at connecting to Wi-Fi again, which finally worked, to my delight.
Setting it up relied on running some programs as root relied on entering my password for doas, and only held for a one-hour DHCP lease.
With a bit more effort, I could set it up to auto-reconnect sans any new password entry — but I figured that was too much hassle to be worth it.
Normally that might be fine.
But the next morning, still at orientation, I awoke my laptop in its usual screen-locked state. A few attempts at entering a password, each surely correct, gave a frustrating beep with a red flash. Confusing debugging later revealed that a small part of the keyboard broke overnight, a part which included letters in my password.
With several careful, forceful presses, I could get my password in for basic computer use. But connecting to Wi-Fi would require me to type in a password several times, which would be far too annoying, and would completely fail if the keyboard broke any further.
Fortunately, there were communal laptops; I borrowed one. At least course registration is all online, so any browser-enabled computer would fungibly suffice. But the uni's mandatory multi-factor authentication failed to get its requisite phone call to my phone, which phone call was only needed sith I was using a novel-to-me device.
A professor saved me at the last minute, signing me up for classes via his magical authorised professory backdoor. Thanks, Tom!
A fellow orientee (R.M.R.) suggested I avoid these problems by using a more conventional laptop (say, something from after 2015 running Windows), or a more full-featured phone. He's right; those changes would have handily averted this chain of failure. But here are some other small counterfactuals by which I would've succeeded at my tasks earlier:
My problems only got as dire and frustrating as they did from a long sequence of separate, individually-occasional accidents.
Image by Ben Aveling on Wikimedia Commons, 2023, CC-BY-SA 4.0
Life is like a stack of slices of Swiss cheese. Every step in your task has some risk of failure: the holes in the cheese. You fail iff your attempt passes thru a hole in every layer. You avoid failure by stacking more slices, or making slices have smaller holes.
Here's how I'll shrink the holes in the cheese for next time: